As of late last year, a Fremont, Calif., man had donated his sperm 328 times to would-be parents who found him on the Internet. The Food and Drug Administration has told the donor, whose self-described “service to help the community” has produced 14 children, to stop.

Cryos, an international network of sperm banks based in Denmark, is refusing donations from gingers, because, says director Ole Schou, there simply isn’t demand outside of Ireland, where red hair sells “like hot cakes.” The company is most interested in sperm from Indian donors and those with brown hair and eyes. (more)

They’ve gone and done it, those crafty scientists: As reported by Nature (as in the publication), a team of Japanese researchers has successfully cultivated “fully developed sperm” from “immature mouse testicles.” And they’re not just showing off.

It turns out that the woman who recently gave birth to eight babies already had six in vitro kids at home, no spouse, no job and a pending bankruptcy. There’s a word for this achievement of medicine’s reproductive business: nuts.

Doctors on the frontier of in vitro fertilization now offer to test embryos for predisposition to treatable cancers and other ailments using the same technique that detects some serious childhood maladies. As scientists learn more about the code that builds human life, critics warn of an age when the wealthy will be able to buy a healthier brood.